McSorley's Bar

Mac had a place to drink and talk downtown

Where only men were welcome, or grown boys.

When the grey snow flew there was the forum stove

Where arguments were slow, and out of noise.

The dust was old as Sumter, and the talking

Had never stopped since Dixie went to war,

And all the men from Grant to Hayes to now

Had lived beside, been buried from that bar.

There, in the evening, the city carpenter

Bumped up a drink with one of Croker's men

And politics and poetry were one

From supper time until it closed at ten.

The grey-haired men considered from their chairs

How time is emptied like a single ale.

Their china eyes saw tabby woo the fire

As men their recollection at the rail.

Here, among blackened walls, men's time

Flowed past like peaceful dreams of Chinamen

Who sit in temples thinking of those flowers

That die, and live, and close their blooms again.

Here the day's passions, after dusk,

Would, while the children called beneath the L,

Draw in like coals in pipes to gleam in silence

Between the words that cursed or wished them well.

Privilege and extortion and corruption

Or the wreck of the city or some way to power

Described the moving lives of living men

In voices where each hero had his hour.

And sorrow that rendezvoused in here

Flowed like a stellar scheme whose dying ions

Flow down to night when orders somewhere else

Gather the suns like a summer's dandelions.